


Orion

by cambria



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-08
Updated: 2013-10-08
Packaged: 2017-12-28 19:05:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/995451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cambria/pseuds/cambria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Jaeger pilot in Los Angeles gets the short end of the stick. She's not dead, but maybe, sometimes, she wishes she was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Orion

**Author's Note:**

> Doesn't really have anything to do with canon, except the general setting; I just really wanted to write something for another Jaeger pilot that wasn't shipped off to Hong Kong. (Not that it would be possible, because there were only four crews.)

they're both twenty one when they make their first drop. you would never have picked them in a lineup to be pilots. of anything. maybe one of them, because she'd already spent time in a naval academy on the east coast. she'd been trained in several kinds of combat. she would've been a nice pilot candidate. but the other one?  
honestly, she never quite understood why she was picked. sure, she'd received some basic hand-to-hand combat lessons forever ago, and she was probably the only (living) person drift-compatible who wasn't under the age of eighteen.  
still.  
there were probably hundred of eager, able-bodied men and women... well, it doesn't much matter. they both scored pretty damn well in the sim runs. (the trainee with 32 drops and just as many kills, the older with 28 drops and 26 kills. you can't win 'em all.)

their first kaiju is a category three, and it takes them an hour to kill it, and they aren't alone. they almost lose sync in the drift several times. they know each other well enough, though, to know what it's about to happen and when the rabbit is getting too tempting to ignore. they're good together, like that; they bring each other back. it takes an hour to take the bastard down, and by the end of it they're shaking, nervous wrecks. but they catch their breaths, climb out of the conn-pod, get claps on the shoulder and shakes of hands from the other jaeger pilots.  
the los angeles shatterdome is a buzz for the one or two days after their takedown. the kaiju had fallen within the miracle mile, off-shore. it was a pain to try and haul that corpse away afterwards, but the successful kill was a victory regardless.

a few years pass like that. the two jaeger pilots get only a few chances to drop, and not all of them end in kill. sometimes the other jaegers go in for the kill and they stay in the miracle mile, close to shore, making sure that everythign stays in order.   
and then the jaeger program is being called off, and they have one last drop. it's a cat four, and it's horrible and uglier than the others and it's _smart_. it goes for their arms first. the pulse canon's gone. they manage to dodge several tries for the reactor core, but eventually they react just that side of too slowly, and the kaiju's giant elongated maw closes in on the jawger's middle, and if the reactor core doesn't blow up, it shuts down completely. 

all she remembers is the pain. pain in her right arm, pain in her chest, pain in her legs. the kaiju tried everything it could to incapacitate them completely; them, and the jaeger. she wakes up several months later in the hospital with scars that are angry and red and that she's told won't ever really fade to white. that's not what preoccupies her, however.

it's nine months later and she wakes up despite everyone,s predictions. but her co-pilot doesn't. the now-twenty four year old jaeger pilot is down and out of the count, with only machine keeping her beat beating and her lungs expanding.  
and the terrible part is that despite not being in a giant suit of armor anymore, and despite their brains not completing each other anymore, it still feels like they're both in the drift together. it doesn't make any sense, and she can't feel anything her friend is feeling and she can't catch any images or sounds, but it's just /there/. the impression that they're still connected.

and it _hurts_.

bellatrix khin is declared officially dead on december 20th 2024. the irony is lost on no one.

cambria amblyne is deemed unfit to pilot. the jaeger counter strike is decomissioned and taken apart. spare parts are sent to hong kong to help recomission the jaeger gipsy danger. there's a bitterness that settles in amblyne's gut when she learns this that never quite leaves her.   
although she can't step into a jaeger anymore, she gets sent off to hong kong anyways, for technical support and for whatever else marshall pentecost may need her for.

she's bitter and scared and angry at the world for the duration of the flight there. when she walks out of the helicopter onto the bad of the chinese shatterdome, it's with a cane and very little dignity. she putters about here and there and overhears a part of a conversation she most likely shouldn't have.

another kaiju attack in four days. a week, if they're lucky, which, admittedly, they are not. then it's a matter of hours down to, eventually, minutes. double events. triple events. none of that sounds remotely good at all, and amblyne rushes back to her room to mull it over. though there isn't much to think about; the apocalypse is at their doorstep, and she prays to god they have a solid plan to stop it. extinction doesn't sound too pleasant.


End file.
